Research Interests for Frances S. Hasso

My research has focused on the intersections between states, social movements, and individual subjectivities and identities, especially in the Arab world. My first book, Resistance, Repression, and Gender Politics in Occupied Palestine and Jordan, found and explained different social change strategies, and cultural and gender politics, in the Jordan and Occupied Territories branches of a Palestinian nationalist organization and its affiliated women’s organization. My latest book, Consuming Desires: Family Crisis and the State in the Middle East, focuses on the rise of new sexual and marital subjectivities and practices among Sunni Muslims, especially in the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. I am increasingly interested in critical and feminist geographical approaches, particularly as they can be applied to revolutionary and counterrevolutionary dynamics in the Arab world. I co-organized a workshop and am currently working on a book project titled "Geographies of Gender in the Arab Revolutions." I am also working on a book length research project: "'Civil' and 'Space' as Fields of Meaning and Practice in Post-Revolutionary Egypt." My research has been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the American Sociological Association, the Palestinian American Research Center, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (Leiden), among others. I am active in the Middle East Studies Association of North America and the American Sociological Association. In the ASA, I co-founded the Caucus on Transnational Approaches to Gender and Sexuality in 1999 and in 2008-2010 was an elected member of the Sally Hacker Graduate Student Paper Award Committee of the Sex and Gender Section. Beginning in 2014, I will be co-editing the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies for a 4-year period. See my personal website for publications and other information.